A lot of little things going on

I think if I had to come up with a word to describe the last week, I'd go with "scattered." I still have too many projects open at the moment, but I'm limping along because of otherobligations.

Writing

I need to process the edits for Sand and Blood. They are reasonably extensive, but the "Track Changes" caused Libreoffice to choke. That means I have to switch over to Windows and Microsoft Word to integrate them, which makes it just that muchharder.

I'm mostly done with Sand and Ash except for a short stack of feedback from the writing group. Once I get through those, I'm going to let it marinate for a little bit before finding/reusing aneditor.

Because the writing group didn't have enough submissions, I (foolishly) started working on Sand and Bone, the third and final book of theseries.

I also submitted a short story for an anthology I was asked for. That will show up this Thursday, which gives me a day to integrate feedback and get it in before thedeadline.

I still have a commission that I keep not finding the time to do. I did tell the commissioner that I was going to be overloaded for a few more weeks, so this isn't critical. I just don't likeprocrastination.

I'm still trying to get the swearing and insult stuff done, but I got distracted by reformatting my conlang's dictionary intoYAML.

Support

Outside of writing, I had a little bit of IT support at home. SMWM's laptop stopped booting on Tuesday. After messing around for an hour or so, it looks like she trashed her hard drive again. I was bemoaning the lack of SSD of an appropriate size when a coworker said that there were 750 GB SSDs on sale. So, I snatched up a 750 and a 250 (for myself since my computer was also locking up) and installed them on Friday. Unfortunately, I forgot to check my hard drive size so I ended up going from a 320 to a 250. Which is fine, I had too much crud on mycomputer.

Development

Somehow, in the middle of reinstalling my entire laptop, I also did a little bit of work with docbook2odf 2.1.0 and mfgames-writing-make. It now generates an error-free Smashwords documents and fixes most of the outstanding issues. That means that I don't have to do any manual editing on the resulting document before uploading toSmashwords.

This means that in a single command (make all), I generate the print-ready PDF in A5, the Kindle MOBI, the Smashwords Microsoft Word document, and an epubcheck-verified EPUB. And the PDF handles proper hyphenation for my conlang, drop capitals and epigraphs, and even building the "also by"section.

The system is still badly organic, but it "works for me." Eventually, I'll get it cleaned up, but I have so many other things, I'm limping along with this system until I can do something else. But, still nice to be able to have everything in 10 seconds and know there won't be any errors (in the technicalside).

2014-03-10

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